So it’s a Monday afternoon and I’m drinking in bed because I’m a grown-ass man and you’re not the boss of me, when suddenly an iPhone buzz announces an email from Vince. Furious that my spam filter isn’t working, I open it to read the following headline: Kevin Smith to Reinvent the Sequel by Beginning ‘Clerks 3′ as a Fan-Influenced Book. Lickety-split, I threw my Pimm’s Cup at a housekeeper of dubious ethnicity and dove for my laptop.

Let’s just take a look at some of these block quotes.

I haven’t talked about this yet. I want to do Clerks 3 as a book first. I want to do it in episodic chapters, so that as I release it people can read the whole thing, see what it would look like. I get to go inside the characters’ heads, tell year one origin stories. The first chapter is Dante and Randal meeting in kindergarten…all the stuff I can’t do in a movie. I’m a stoner [GUHHH – Ed.], so I want to investigate the inner life of every character, and I can’t do that in 90 minutes.

“I wonder what Dante and Randal were like in kindergarten” is what I imagine my ex-girlfriend screaming during yacht sex with her new Brazilian boyfriend. I don’t quite know what that means either, but just know that I find the query both completely irrelevant and yet utterly torturous given the circumstances. And the reason, Kevin, that you can’t do kindergarten Dante in a movie is because no one cares. Sure, if Quentin Tarantino made a movie about Vincent Vega and Jules Winfield in kindergarten, the world would explode. Babies in bespoke suits washing baby brains off their baby hands is a priori awesome. What are we supposed to do with baby Dante? “Hey everybody, look at this whiny baby in a Cosby sweater. He wasn’t even supposed to BE here today!” F*ck that baby and f*ck you, Kevin.

Also, didn’t you already make Clerks: The TV Show, Clerks: The Animated Series and Clerks: The Comics? Weren’t those episodic? So, to be clear, you already once before chopped-up the dead horse you’ve been beating, and now you’re announcing that you’re going to finely dice it too?

If I’m doing it in pieces as opposed to just writing one big fat book, I’ll be honest with you, the audience is going to influence it as I read each chapter. And I know a lot of people are going to be like, ‘Well that’s ridiculous, it should be your artistic statement,’ but my whole thing, my leitmotif [Pssh, more like “weight-motif” – Ed.], my entire career has been about audience interactivity.

Your career was launched due to your own hard work and ability to stretch a shoe-string budget. There wasn’t an audience to interact with then, so I’m not sure what you’re even saying here. You can’t just call your recent pandering “leitmotif” and think you’ll get away with it. Also, how dare you make me ask Siri what “late motif” means. Bitch probably thinks she’s better than me now.

For me to kind of write [Clerks 3] episodically, and let people read it chapter-by-chapter, and then pipe in…it could actually allow me to change direction. And again, I know there are a lot of people out there going “Why would you want to? You’re an artist,” well now I’m a New Media artist, and the New Media artist involves the audience, and that’s something I’ve been doing for like nearly twenty years at this point anyway. And if I’m working on this book version, I think that’d be fun to be influenced by the audience every step of the way.

“I am here to announce for the first time that I am now a New Media artist. Which I, uhhh, always have been. Even back then, when New Media didn’t exist.” Look, Clerks 3 is already the embodiment of a cash-grab from a man with nothing more to say, so perhaps it’s fitting that Kevin Smith would decide to just turn it into some sort of sycophantic Mad Libs. Here, let’s try it: “Meanwhile at the Quick Stop, Dante whines like a bitch while Silent Bob just f*cking stands there.” Boom. Scene One in the bag.

In closing, the poster for Clerks 3 should just be a picture of Kevin Smith shrugging while farting.

I believe what he’s trying to say is that he wants other people to write the thing that is going to make him a lot of money so that he doesn’t have to write it and when anyone hates it, he can blame it on the people who wrote it while he counts the money.

We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.…
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back. And shit.

Awesome, Ace! My wife and I saw Patton live when she was 8 months pregnant. She laughed so hard she almost had him prematurely. We told him this after the show and he said “If that happens, you need to name him Patton.”

Lo-lee-ta, ‘n shit: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate and shit like that to tap, at three, on the teeth and shit. Lo. Lee. Ta… And shit like that. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock and shit. She was Lola in my flicks. She was Dolly at school and shit like that. She was was Dolores on the dotted line ‘n shit. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor, or shit like that? She did, indeed she did, folks. Shit, in point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea ‘n’ shit. Oh when? Psh, shit, about as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer (lol I’m a stoner). You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style ‘n’ shit like that. Folks of the jury, exhibit number one is what the critics, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns and shit.

First, the internet lauds Hit Girl as super awesome despite clearly being a sociopath who will never be able to function in normal society. Then Chareth suggests that kindergarten children washing brains off themselves and wearing suits would be awesome.

Don’t have kids, Internet. You know, for those that are allowed to be near them

Fair enough, but there’s something particularly disturbing about movies that celebrate it in children. Hit Girl for instance, didn’t choose to be a murdering vigilante like the Punisher or Batman (you know people die even if he doesn’t mean it). She’s forced into it by a Nicholas Cage-level crazy dad. And the only person that finds a girl forced into a lifestyle of murderous vigilantism wrong is the cop friend.

Hit Girl is *supposed* to be disturbing. It’s satire. It’s trying to point out that you should be careful wishing for more realistic superheroes, because if you actually think about the concept, it’s pretty fucked up.